Circle of Treason

by Sandra V. Grimes

  The thrill of that first day did not diminish, but our focus immediately became the seemingly impossible pledge we had made to him, which we were determined to honor. The hurdles were many and monumental. First, few could be made aware of the very existence of Sheymov, but many had to be included to effect his request. Worse, he had demanded exfiltration not for one person but for three, including a five-year-old child. (As detailed earlier, we had planned Kulak’s removal from the USSR but had not had to carry it out.) To add another element of danger, primarily for Sheymov, we had to conduct face-to-face meetings with him in Moscow to work out the details of the exfiltration. He had rejected a series of dead drops to exchange information because of time constraints and the magnitude of the operation. Finally add the frigid Moscow winter to a number of the personal meetings, Sheymov’s work schedule for the KGB, to include travel to Yemen and possibly other trips, and a five-to-six-month window to complete the operation.

  A day or two after his walk-in in Warsaw Sheymov returned to Moscow and shortly thereafter left for Yemen on KGB business. At CIA headquarters cable traffic flew back and forth to Moscow Station and meeting after meeting was convened to find answers to the most basic operational questions. What border should we use for the crossing? How should the family get to a pick-up point with our officer or officers? What type of conveyance should we use to attempt the border crossing? How should we secrete the family members in the vehicle? Slowly the framework of a plan emerged. Next we had to address the personal details related to the Sheymov family. These numbered in the hundreds, were equally critical, and were often debated ad nauseam. Many of them required that Sheymov and his family maintain a normal pattern of activity.

  One caused great consternation. The problem was simple. How do you keep a five-year-old quiet in cramped quarters on a trip that could last a number of hours? In a bureaucracy, the solution was not straightforward. A disagreement erupted between SE Division and a support component that could not be resolved. Thankfully, without communication with us Sheymov understood the problem and he alone came to the rescue. As he relates in his book, he had a conversation with his wife Olga: “Elena could be a major problem during the operation. I’m afraid we have no alternative but to sedate her with some kind of sleeping pill during the actual border crossing. . . . By definition, a five-year-old child is completely unpredictable and we can’t hope for the best. There’s too much at stake.”14

  We have chosen not to relate the details of the spring 1980 exfiltration nor Sheymov’s ultimate contribution to the U.S. government. Suffice it to say that the former was flawless and the latter extraordinary. What was and remains important is that three human beings risked all. Everyone involved in the operation from the CIA to the Sheymov family deserves credit for the success of such a perilous operation, including the gods of good luck and good fortune.

  LATER MAJOR CASES

  THE CIA HAD NO MONOPOLY on running good cases against the KGB during the Cold War. As has been mentioned separately, the British SIS handled Oleg Gordievsky in place for many years. There are other examples not mentioned in this book run by other services. The following story outlines how the French were able to maintain frequent contact with a KGB scientific and technical specialist in Moscow for a couple of years, thereby acquiring a large amount of very valuable documents, until the asset caused his own downfall.

  In November 1980 a French businessman telephoned Raymond Nart, a senior officer of the French internal service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, or DST. Nart and the businessman were friends and the businessman wanted Nart to come by his office. When the two met, the businessman showed Nart a postcard, mailed from Eastern Europe. The writer, a KGB officer named Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, had been stationed in Paris from 1965 to 1970 and, while there, had been acquainted with the businessman. Now, after a hiatus of several years, Vetrov was trying to renew the contact and stated in his card that he hoped to see the businessman as quickly as possible.1

  Both Nart and the businessman recognized the possibility that Vetrov, who had become enamored with France during his assignment there, wanted to work with the French. However, while they were working out a secure recontact plan, Vetrov made another move. In February 1981, he attended a commercial exhibit in Moscow and, like Penkovskiy and Tolkachev before him, passed a note to a Westerner. The recipient on this occasion was a Frenchman. The note requested a meeting and included Vetrov’s telephone number. Luckily, the Frenchman duly passed the note to the DST when he returned to Paris.

  In response to the note, Nart and his colleagues dispatched a French engineer known to them by reputation. He was asked to go to Moscow and to telephone Vetrov, which he did. The two met in early March and Vetrov provided both information and documents. He continued to do so during subsequent meetings. In April, however, realizing the danger to the engineer because he of course did not have diplomatic immunity, the DST arranged for the military attaché at the French embassy in Moscow, an individual favorably known to Nart, to take over the case. Highly fruitful meetings between Vetrov, who by now had been encrypted FAREWELL by the DST, continued until late 1981. The attaché then left for Paris on Christmas leave. He had an appointment with Vetrov after his return but Vetrov did not appear.

  When Vetrov started producing reams of Russian-language documents, the DST was faced with a problem. They did not have a cadre expert in both the language and the technical substance. Furthermore, they wanted to provide Vetrov with a miniature camera to minimize the risk of his document photography and did not have state-of-the-art equipment. Therefore, they decided to approach the CIA, which provided the requested technical and non-technical translations and analytical support but did not participate directly in the operation. Jeanne remembers a cart piled high with photocopies being rolled past her door in SE CI in the summer of 1981, and soon she became involved with editing some of the translated material.

  In all, during the life of the operation Vetrov produced more than three thousand secret and top secret documents emanating not only from the Directorate T (Science and Technology) of the KGB, but also from the Military-Industrial Commission (VPK) of the USSR Council of Ministers. As explained in the section on Polyakov, the VPK coordinated and controlled all research, design, development, testing, and production of Soviet military equipment and systems. An integral part of the VPK’s responsibility was the issuance of collection requirements on military matters for all Soviet government agencies from the KGB and GRU to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade. VPK documents were highly valuable to CIA and Department of Defense analysts because they showed the gaps in the Soviet Union’s military and industrial might. Polyakov produced some for us, as did Kulak. We also got some watered-down requirements from an East European source. The KGB operational documents, on the other hand, showed what clandestine activities the KGB—and the GRU and the East European services—were undertaking to close those gaps. In other words, they contained a vast number of espionage leads. Those leads were still being investigated several years after the case came to its untimely close.

  Considering the circumstances of the meetings with Vetrov, it is understandable that we do not have a clear view of his motivations. He was undoubtedly a Francophile, but he did not want to defect and spend the rest of his life amusing himself in Parisian cafés and restaurants. Revenge was a definite factor, but he was an undisciplined individual who could have butted up against the KGB bureaucracy in any number of ways. According to Yurchenko, who participated in his interrogation, Vetrov wrote a long document vilifying the Soviet system as a whole and the KGB in particular, saying that the system was totally rotten.

  The unfortunate denouement of the FAREWELL operation cannot be attributed to a Western traitor or to clever KGB scrutiny. Alas, Vetrov caused his own downfall. The story is a sensational one. Because it was the subject of much corridor gossip in the KGB, several versions have come down to us. Therefore, the following details may not be
entirely correct, but the gist of the story is pretty clear. Vetrov was having an affair with a KGB secretary named Lyudmila. One cold night they were in his parked car, indulging in some dalliance. Someone knocked on the window. It turned out to be a militiaman (or Lyudmila’s husband or some other lover of hers). Vetrov, who was drunk and who had a gun, shot and killed the man. He also tried to kill Lyudmila, but failed. She was able to testify against him. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. While there he said something to a fellow inmate or a guard about his espionage activity on behalf of the French. According to one story, the fellow inmate was about to be released and Vetrov wanted him to contact the French embassy in Moscow. In any event, Vetrov was tried again, this time for espionage. He was sentenced to death and duly executed early in 1983.

  In 1982 GRU colonel Vladimir Mikhaylovich Vasilyev, under cover as a Soviet military attaché, volunteered to a U.S. military representative in Budapest, Hungary, then part of the Soviet Bloc. The military turned him over to the CIA to handle, a particularly delicate job in a Communist country where all Western representatives, and particularly intelligence officers, were under considerable surveillance. The CIA encrypted him GTACCORD. The turnover did not please Vasilyev who, as a military man, preferred to deal with his uniformed counterparts, because he knew them personally and had contact with them as part of his normal duties. That the CIA officer who became his new handler was a woman and a civilian probably did not help matters. Nonetheless, the CIA—with substantial U.S. military assistance—managed to keep in limited but productive contact with Vasilyev until he returned to Moscow on a routine change of station in the summer of 1984.

  Vasilyev provided a variety of intelligence to the CIA. However, because communications with him were difficult and infrequent, we did not always understand the nature of his access nor do we have a clear view of his motivation. Among the most significant items he passed were copies of top secret documents emanating from the U.S. Army in Germany. Since 1978 the CIA had been aware, from East European sources, that there was massive leakage from U.S. forces in Germany to the Hungarians, but our sources’ reporting was oral. The anecdotal and somewhat vague information had duly been passed to our military counterintelligence and to the FBI. An investigation had been opened but had not borne fruit. Now we had the actual documents, and they were chilling; they outlined in detail what the Western response would be to a Soviet invasion. Vasilyev had no idea who the source of the top secret documents was, but he knew that Hungarian military intelligence immediately passed the documents to the GRU in Budapest, that the GRU had them flown to its headquarters in Moscow on a priority basis, and that the GRU was footing the bill for the operation.

  In brief, the information provided by Vasilyev dealt the final blow to the espionage activities of former U.S. Army sergeant Clyde Conrad and his partners in crime. Conrad was arrested in Germany, where he had retired, in August 1988 thanks to cooperation between U.S. military counterintelligence and the German criminal police. He was tried in a German court in early 1990 and sentenced to life in prison. This case, probably because it was run by East Europeans and not by the Soviet Union, has never received the attention it deserves. As former CIA Associate Deputy Director for Operations (ADDO)/CI Paul Redmond is fond of remarking, if there had been a hot war we would have lost because Conrad had compromised all the plans for the defense of Western Europe.2

  Vasilyev was compromised in two stages. His first betrayer was Edward Lee Howard. According to Yurchenko, during Howard’s first meeting with the KGB, which took place in Vienna probably in late 1984, he reported on an unnamed “angry colonel” who was being run by the CIA in Budapest. Howard was accurate in that Vasilyev had complained angrily about the way we were handling him. Whether Howard was under the misapprehension that Vasilyev was from the KGB, or whether the KGB made an unwarranted assumption, is unknown. In any event, this report unleashed an investigation of all the KGB colonels in Budapest, of which there were several. As far as we know, no special attention was paid to GRU colonels. And, as it happened, Vasilyev had already left for a new post in Moscow by the time the investigation got under way.

  The reporting from Ames was much more definitive. Ames would have had his facts straight because much of this case was handled by SE CI, where he worked, and he would have had access to the cable traffic. One of his subordinates had been responsible for the translation of the written messages we exchanged with Vasilyev. The most probable date for Ames’ initial betrayal of Vasilyev is 13 June 1985. However, according to everything we have heard, Vasilyev was not arrested until early June 1986. Like others, he was subsequently tried and executed.

  Much has been made of the one-year gap between Ames’ reporting on Vasilyev and his arrest. When he left for Moscow, Vasilyev had a detailed plan for internal communications, which he began to implement. In August 1985, when we had the benefit of Yurchenko’s reporting and when we began to realize that we were having other difficulties in our Soviet operations, a debate opened as to whether we should continue to receive materials from Vasilyev. However, after receiving our green light, on 11 December he dropped a package to us. This was our last contact with him.

  There are some, for instance the interagency Ames Damage Assessment Team convened after Ames’ 1994 arrest, who have concluded that the documents in this package were manufactured by the KGB to mislead us as to Vasilyev’s well-being and continued access. To be sure, as described elsewhere in this book, the KGB undoubtedly did undertake such deception operations. However, this package contained valuable intelligence covering a broad range of topics and emanating from a variety of Soviet official institutions. It was not CI-related and did not contain any material that would mislead us in our investigations.

  Some will say that it would have been impossible for Vasilyev, who had been compromised several months earlier, to put down a genuine drop without being observed and arrested by the KGB. Yet even the KGB had its limitations. Because of reporting from Howard, Ames, and Hanssen, they were forced to open perhaps as many as twenty espionage investigations against U.S. penetrations of their country’s secrets. Resources must have been strained to the limit. Furthermore, they would have had to establish some sort of priority list. In retrospect, we can see that the highest priority was given to our KGB and GRU assets abroad, who were out of their control. It was necessary to lure them back to the Soviet Union, so they could be arrested, and this had to be done using various believable pretexts. If the KGB had started mass arrests in Moscow, our assets abroad would presumably have learned of these actions and asked us to arrange their orderly defections. Only when the KGB’s first priority task was accomplished, which happened in mid-November with the orchestrated departure of Varenik from Germany, could it start giving undivided attention to the second priority—persons inside the Soviet Union who had some means of communicating with us. Vasilyev belonged in this group.

  By way of comparison, when the FBI opened its full-scale investigation of Rick Ames in the spring of 1993, this was the major undertaking of the Washington Metropolitan Field Office and much of the local FBI’s resources were allocated to it. Yet the FBI did not surveil Ames twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. First of all, surveilling a trained intelligence officer is no easy job. If the suspect, because of his training and experience, detects that he is under surveillance, he might flee the country. At best, he might just cease any operational activity. Obviously, the FBI did not want this to happen, so they hung back at times, depending on telephone coverage to keep abreast of Ames’ comings and goings. They made one mistake, however. On 7 September the surveillance team deployed to Ames’ residence early in the morning as usual. However, when they got there shortly after 6:30, they saw that Ames’ car was sitting in the driveway instead of the garage. They deduced that he had gone out, and they were right. It was later ascertained that he had signaled to his KGB handlers by making a chalk mark on a mailbox. Later that day they lost him again for an hour when their radio sy
stem broke down. We do not find it surprising that the Moscow KGB, with all the investigations being handled, might have had the same sort of problems and limitations that the Washington FBI did.

  Gennadiy Aleksandrovich Smetanin, a GRU officer under military attaché cover in Lisbon, Portugal, volunteered to the CIA in late 1983. He was handled by our Lisbon office, which had personal meetings with him under the guise of tennis dates. There are two unusual aspects to this case. First of all, it is a rare example of a spouse also cooperating with the CIA. Mrs. Smetanin, who worked in the consular section of the Soviet embassy, did not have access to real state secrets but she shared with us the information that came across her desk. She also participated in at least one meeting with her husband’s CIA handlers.

  The second unusual aspect of the case involves the polygraph. It was not customary to polygraph our Soviet assets. However, early in our relationship with Smetanin he demanded the sum of $330,000 saying that he had embezzled it from GRU funds in Lisbon. (As an aside, neither Sandy nor Jeanne was around when that happened. Both were very familiar with GRU regulations and practices, and knew that it was totally unlikely that the GRU would have anywhere near that amount of cash locally. Only a few years earlier, Polyakov’s large residency had a limit of $10,000.) Anyway, this was during the Casey era. He was consulted and decided that Smetanin could have the money if he passed a polygraph. A polygrapher was duly summoned to Lisbon, Smetanin submitted to the examination, the polygrapher was satisfied with the results, and Smetanin got his money.3 Sad to say, Smetanin’s request for a large sum was just his way of testing us. He never spent the bulk of the money.